


Handful of Dust

by tristesses



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Drugs, F/M, Gen, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:13:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. Or, Joker imparts his philosophy on a select few.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Handful of Dust

**Author's Note:**

> Title and various quotes belong to T. S. Eliot. Originally posted 1/5/2009.

The thing about chaos is – it's unexpected. No one ever sees it coming. That's just _ridiculous_ , though, because when you think about it it's lurking under the surface of everyone and everything. _Especially_ in the places where carefully constructed human realities stretch _thin_ and _tight_ over the bulging bones of the unrestrained chaotic mess of creation – slice the skin and it pumps out like blood, hot and sticky and overpowering. Everyone's blood is red, at least on the surface, everyone's blood flows violet-blue under their flesh, everyone's blood can carry the same salvation or killer through their veins – the hemoglobin, the leukocytes, the viruses and clots – the plagues and famines and bounties and forest fires of the human body. It's _chaos_ in there – out here – what's the difference? A cat is a cat is a cat, after all – a series of explosives littered throughout a subway station (ka- _pow_ , the flames feed off the air we breathe, so it's us versus the fire, and who do you think wins?) creates the same level of chaos as a little girl dying in a little girl bedroom of influenza. Who'da thunk it, in this day and age! Ooh, but won't her family _weep_ , won't those people _scream_. Yes, the taste of panic in the air is chaos, pure unbigoted chaos, and the thing about chaos is, it's _fair_.

And chaos is a snapped violin string in the middle of a symphony, it's the cruel dependability of destruction and the handmaid of creativity, it's what's inside the brain of Oppenheimer and Vlad Tepes and even _yours truly_. Chaos is settled ash after an explosion. Chaos is fine leather shoes crushing coals underfoot as I walk through the rubble, soot crusting the hems of my trousers. Chaos in an itemized list reads like this: one Gotham defense attorney, blown to smithereens, a do-gooder well-done, with his eyes over-easy and bones charred into cinders. It could've been her, it could've been me. It could've been the _Bat_.

The thing about chaos is – well. _You_ know.  


  
**. . .**   


 

The Joker crouches in the rubble, paws through piles of shattered brick and burnt plywood until he finds what he's looking for: a skull, human, partially caved in on one side, blackened strings of muscle and flesh still clinging on to the smooth bone. Teeth still inset in the jaw; the Joker can see a gold filling in the top left molar.

"Alas, poor _Har_ -vey," he sighs, and lifts the skull up, scrutinizing it from the bottom. Dust motes float in the air, all that's left of the warehouse and of Harvey. "I knew you well. Probably better than anyone. The late, great Harvey Dent, scrubbing the scum off the streets of Gotham to salve his own _guil_ ty conscience. What other heroic acts could you have done?"

His tongue flicks out, wets his lips; excess saliva dribbles from the corners of his mouth, where the scars don't permit his lips to seal. When he thinks, he nibbles on the scar tissue in his mouth. And his eyes are cold, frighteningly _sane_ , as he sets the skull on the ground.

"I think it took you a long time to realize," he whispers, "that no one was coming." A little giggle, an added lilt to his voice. "No Bat swooping down to save your hide, Gotham's best and brightest were – _otherwise occupied_ – no one to save you, Har – vey – Dent!"

He smashes the skull with a gleeful little hop, grinding it to gravel, snapping the rubbery tendons.

"The intersection of reality and chaos is pain," he murmurs, and strides away, rubbing the grime off the soles of his shoes on the pavement.  


  
**. . .**   


 

The stars are holes in the pincushion of the Gotham skyline, punctured by lean skyscrapers stretching to space. The view from Bruce's penthouse is at once too vivid and bright, and stark and distant, like a photograph or a partially-faded memory. Rachel is nursing a tumbler of whiskey, although she doesn't like the taste; what she craves is the burn that comes twenty seconds after she drinks and lies coiled in her stomach, a little fire. It's almost like she and Harvey have something in common, still.

When a light of the cityscape twinkles, she wonders if it's Batman, sweeping above the streets, looming ominously over the crack dens and gutters. Looking for the Joker. (Maybe he's dead, but that's too much to hope for.)

She hears footsteps, soft and even, and says tiredly, "Go to sleep, Alfred, I still don't need anything."

A click, the sound of a wet tongue against the roof of his mouth.

"Alfred's not in right now, sweetheart."

She spins on her heel with an inarticulate scream, flinging her glass in the direction of the voice, that horribly careful, logical _voice_ – she's only heard it on the news but she knows what it belongs to, oh yes. The glass splatters whiskey along Bruce's fine carpet and clips the intruder's shoulder and smashes into the wall; he takes a shuddering step back at the impact, but still that awful smile remains, a parody of cheer smeared bloodily across his cheeks. His thumbs hooked through his belt loops.

She puts the sofa between them, leaning heavily on it, and hisses, "What did you do to Alfred?"

"Oh, not much," the Joker replies, crouching; he's plucking tiny glass shards from the carpet. "Just…mildly incapacitated him, I guess you could say."

"You fucker, if you hurt him – " The sheer amount of venom in her veins is incredible. She hasn't felt this much hate for anyone, ever, or at least since high school. Ha, ha; bad joke at a bad time, but she supposes this is her mind's way of coping with stress.

"Hurt him?" the Joker asks incredulously, and tips the handful of glass onto the coffee table. "Me? I wouldn't hurt a fly!" A pause, a grimace-grin. "Unless I was a spider. But I'm in his parlor, not the other way around, so he's safe for now."

"What do you want from me?"

He's picked up the bottle of whiskey, scrutinizing the label, holding it at an odd parallel angle to his arm; he blends in disturbingly well with the designer wallpaper and the carefully sculpted shadows.

"Your Brucey has good taste," he says thoughtfully, and takes a swig. "Sorry, but it's such bad manners not to offer a guest a drink."

She is far too exhausted for these games. She remains silent, watching him warily. He approaches her, and she tenses, but where could she run to? Out the window, to be smeared across the pavement? No, thanks, she'd rather face her death in this pristine place than at nine point eight meters per second per second.

"Here," and he offers her the bottle, "have a sip." He presses the aperture to her mouth, and when she doesn't drink he crushes it against her lips until the pressure of the glass and her teeth slice little cuts in her lip and she opens her mouth and her eyes – eyes wider, for he jams the bottle against her teeth and tilts it back. It glugs and she swallows until she needs to breathe, she chokes and spits and twists away from him, dangerously close to that window, and he either laughs or clears the phlegm from his throat. She's not sure which.

If she had been paying attention, she would have seen the white flecks of nearly-absorbed powder floating in the alcohol when he sets it on the table.

"Cheers to Brucey," he says, "and to the Bat-man too, wherever he is. Gonna tell me that, hmm? Rachel? Don't keep me waiting, I'm curious."

"I don't have any fucking idea where he is," she snaps, although it's more of a slur, and her vision's beginning to blur and the shapes – God, there's dancing shapes in the carpet, this isn't the whiskey speaking – or looking, as the case may be, the fucker drugged her. She stares slack-jawed and falls to her knees, ripples of goosebumps coursing through her body, heat pricking in her groin. The brush of fabric against her nipples is suddenly intolerable and arousing; the shadow man watching her with a smirk from the corner comes and brushes her hair from her neck. She whimpers and arches into his touch, nearly gone now, and when he wraps her tresses around his gloved hand and yanks her roughly to her feet, pinning her to the couch, the screaming of nerves in her scalp is like foreplay. Her mouth is half-open, lips swollen, eyes glassy but aware. They track his tiny movements, face pressed close to hers, his breath in her nostrils.

" _Who_ – is – the _Bat_ -man?" he hisses, and Rachel lolls her head (the fabric of the furniture rubbing against her skin is just _delicious_ ) and answers, "I don't know…"

His hands, ripping at her pants, he slaps her face and growls, _"Who is the Batman?"_

"Dunno," she whines, he's jammed two fingers inside her and twists them and she bucks her hips against him, "I dunno, I dunno – "

(Right now, she doesn't, she's locked the name away where only sober-sane Rachel can find it.)

" _The Batman_ ," he breathes, and repeats his question like a mantra, and grinds against her, within her, teeth ripping at the flesh on her collarbone and none of it registers as anything but sensation, pure and blinding beyond such petty limitations as pain or pleasure. He grinds against her, within her; mortar and pestle, the thudding impact of their flesh beats out a primal rhythm; reality for Rachel has splintered into a hundred thousand fragments of color and light and sound and touch; reality has been condemned and destroyed; reality has become - _fragmented_ -

"This is madness," she cries, and at the point of climax she screams, "Make it stop!" but there's just his laughter, hysterical caterwauling, etched upon her cornea and eardrum even when he's left her trembling and sprawled against the couch. A distant crash; he's broken the whiskey bottle against the table, it drips alcohol from the jagged edges.

"One more time," he pants, stepping closer and closer and closer, "one more chance. I try to keep it fair, you know. _Who is the Batman?_ "

She shakes her head, and he belts her across the face with the bottle, flinging her blood in delicate stripes along the white flooring. He hits her again, and again when she starts to scream, the decibel of her shrieks only barely outstripping the sound of his mirth.

He cuts her face to ribbons and leaves her hemorrhaging on that gorgeous carpet.  


  
**. . .**   


 

And that brings us to _here_ , where we were always going to end up, although I've got to say, the whole…upside down dangling by a rope thing is a _bit_ of a surprise, but the specifics don't really matter, hmm? The thing about chaos is, it's the same thing as destiny and fate, it just takes the right pair of eyes to see it. We were always going to be – _here_. Here is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object – I'll leave it to _you_ to decide which of us is which – _here_ is the station at the end of the line. _Here_ is the wasteland. And _here_ , oh Batsy you know where _here_ is. It's the place between _idea_ – and _reality_ – between the _motion_ – and the act. Did I tell you I killed your girlfriend? I left her smeared across the floor of Bruce Wayne's penthouse. Oh, sorry, _your_ penthouse. Am I right? Oh, I am, I can see from the way you're grinding your teeth. Are you _crying?_ Batman? Oh ho ho, ha ha ha, you _are_ , you _are_!

You can cut the rope, you know, I betcha you've got the technology hidden in that Batsuit. Or I can lend you a knife. Let me _fall_ , Batman, let me plummet to my death, and you won't have to hear Harvey and Rachel at night, _whispering_ , your fault, _your fault_.

Oh, no, but you _won't._

You are truly incorruptible, aren't you? Hmm? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. You know what I think? I think you and I are destined to do this…forever.

Oh, Batsy. I've played my hand. I don't got an ace in the hole.

Your turn.


End file.
